Energy use, technical progress and productivity growth: A survey of economic issues

Abstract

This is a survey paper for non-specialists on interactions between energy and productivity growth. The first half of the paper surveys the general economic literature linking technical progress to realized gains in productivity growth. The second half of the survey focuses in particular on the important role of energy in linking technical progress to productivity growth, and contains an overview of a great deal of literature, both classic and recent.

Order from Chaos: A Preliminary Protocol for Determining the EROI of Fuels

“…Berndt (1978Berndt ( , 1990 suggests an adjusted form of the relative price approach that utilizes fuel shares as well as prices to weight the quality of each fuel type [22,23]. Berndt refers to this methodology as the "Divisia Index", which is calculated according to the equation (repeated from [6]): (6) where p is the price of n different types of fuels and E is the final consumption of energy (joules) for each fuel type.…”

Explaining the declining energy intensity of the U.S. economy

“…The latter approach is attractive because it is the equivalent of specifying a stock of disembodied energy-saving knowledge as a quasi-fixed input in the model, but the absence of data on the use of patents by industry prevented me from implementing this scheme directly. 5 The first novel aspect of this study is its use of the trick of cumulating energy price increases as the proxy for the stock of knowledge. The fundamental assumption in this regard is that energy price shocks stimulate the creation of energy-saving ideas and process and product designs.…”

Analysis of the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of the Huge Daqing Oil Field in China

“…In order to get quality-corrected energy outputs and direct energy inputs, we used the Divisia index, which basically makes the assumption that the quality of a fuel is related to its relative price per heat unit [5][13] [14]. While price is not the perfect predictor of energy quality, it is better than no correction and easy to get.…”